Dramatic Secrets ‘Stolen Memories’ Explores Complicated Relationships In A Secretive Southern Family

The year is 1956. It’s a steamy, linen handkerchief-sopping Deep South summer. A genteelly tragic, spinsterladen family struggles to present a smooth surface to the world while coping with the roiling currents of shame underneath.

A naive visitor arrives. He unwittingly disturbs the delicate balance, and sends everyone involved on a rendezvous with the too painful past.

Such horror-tinged Southern dramas - whether written by past masters like Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote or by their disciples - are a staple of networks like PBS and Bravo.

One does not expect, however, to see them on the Family Channel, the cable network founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson and his business associates.

But there you will find “Stolen Memories: Secrets From the Rose Garden,” an interesting contemporary example of the genre that has its premiere tonight at 7.

“I was shocked, too,” said Linda Lavin, the film’s executive producer.

“They loved it from the moment they read it,” added Lavin, the stage (“Death Defying Acts,” “The Sisters Rosensweig”) and sitcom (“Alice”) actress.

The Family Channel’s reaction “surprised me, because I thought it was much too dark for them,” Lavin said. “But they never shirked from the piece’s darkness or its terror.”

“The Waltons” it isn’t.

In “Stolen Memories,” written by Tim Cagney, a first-time screenwriter, a 12-year-old Northern boy named Freddie (played by Nathan Watt, last seen in the Diane Keaton film “Unstrung Heroes”) goes south to spend the summer with his three maiden aunts.

It is a decidedly unpleasant visit to unfamiliar territory. The local boys are hostile, and while one of his aunts, Sally Ann (played by Shirley Knight), is kindly, another, Earline (played by Lavin) is stern and rigid. Most ominous, something is terribly wrong with his third aunt, Jessie.

A 50-year-old woman, Jessie is childlike in both demeanor and intelligence. She is alternately playful and seized by inexplicable terrors; for the sake of propriety she is kept locked up in the house and her “condition” is rarely referred to.

Neighbors and relatives exchange smirks and pitying glances; the atmosphere is stultifying.

To pass the time, Freddie befriends his odd aunt, and she warms up to him. As she does, however, she also begins to experience terrifying flashbacks of a long-repressed childhood incident, a violent act with racial overtones that locked her permanently in her mental prison. There is an eventual resolution.

“There’s a lot of shame in it,” Lavin said. “And it comes about because of shameful secrets in a family situation. And that’s an issue that I’m very interested in.”

Moore, best known to television audiences, of course, for her sitcom roles as Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, admits that she jumped at the chance to play the part. She engaged two neurologists to help her capture Jessie’s appropriate speech patterns.

“We wanted it to be believable and accurate, what Jessie’s limitations would be,” Moore says. “Even though she stopped at 6 mentally, she was a very bright 6-year-old when it happened.”

The actress was interested in how Jessie “knows she’s different, but doesn’t understand, doesn’t have the ability for the full impact of why she can’t go to church, that her sisters worry that people may laugh at her, but she has her rose garden… . She’s basically happy until Freddie comes into the house and exposes her to her past.”

But, Moore stresses, the revelation offers Jessie a “greater freedom” to venture out beyond the family property, where she’s been kept “safe.”